American Consequences - July 2017

THE NEW E-MAIL

O n a cold and rainy day in October 1971, Ray Tomlinson sent the first-ever e-mail. At the time, he didn’t think much of it. Nobody told him to do it... He just thought it was neat. Tomlinson was a programmer working on a secret government project called ARPANET... a network of computers that could “talk” to one another. Quietly duplicating a trade that changed 400 years of history in four hours... and why its death has been predicted 129 times already

44 | July 2017

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